WHen We All

Get to HEaven

Founding TEam

Ariana Nedelman is the co-founder of the feminist production company, Not Sorry. She is the co-creator of three podcasts: Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, Hot and Bothered, and The Real Question. She is also a former associate producer at Pemberley Digital, where she helped produce an Emmy Award winning adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. She has her B.A. in Comparative Human Development from the University of Chicago and a graduate certificate in Radio and Podcasting from The Salt Institute of Documentary Studies.

Lynne Gerber is an independent scholar in San Francisco. Her research and writing is focused on religion, morality, and the body in the United States. She is the author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America (Chicago, 2012). Her work has also appeared in American Quarterly, Nova Religio, Gender & Society, Salon, The Revealer, and Religion Dispatches. She has held research positions and taught at Harvard Divinity School and the University of California at Berkeley. Lynne’s article on MCCSF minister Rev. Jim Mitulski in The Revealer won the 2022 Association of LGBTQ Journalists Award in Profile Writing. She’s been a friend of MCCSF since she first attended a Sunday evening service in December of 2001. 

Siri Colom is an urban sociologist who focuses on politics after disasters. She uses the lens of sociology to think about how structural oppression manifests and emerges in the everyday politics of people attempting to rebuild lives and homes. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Worcester State University and holds a PhD from the University of California Berkeley. She has recently been trained in radio production through Transom.   

Production Team

David Herman (Sound Designer) is a sound designer, mix engineer, and composer. He began his radio career at WNYC, where he created the sound design for Freakonomics Radio, The Experiment, and Season 4 of More Perfect. He has contributed work to shows for NPR, The New York Times, Gimlet Media, Stitcher, and The Atlantic, where his sound design was featured in the Peabody award-winning series Floodlines. David is the owner of Good Studio, a recording studio located in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

Sayre Quevedo (Story Editor) is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships. Quevedo began as a reporter with Youth Radio in Oakland, California at the age of 15 in 2008. Since then his work has been featured on National Public Radio, Marketplace , BBC Short Cuts, Love Me on the CBC, and Radio Atlas. In 2018, his piece "Espera" received the TC/RHDF Directors' Choice award and his other piece "The Quevedos" was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for "The Return". It was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA, his second nomination two years in a row. Quevedo was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an Associate Producer for The Daily at The New York Times and Latino USA and a producer for VICE News. He is currently an adjunct at Columbia University's Oral History Program and New York University's Audio Journalism department. 

Tim Dillinger-Curenton (Consulting Producer) is an award-winning music historian with a focus on the worlds of gospel, soul, contemporary Christian, and women's music. A researcher, essayist, and curator, Dillinger-Curenton is the founder of God’s Music Is My Life, a music preservation project encompassing a weekly newsletter housing both long-form features and hosted news aggregation, published video interviews and digitized archival footage, and a monthly radio show dedicated to traditional gospel music. In partnership with Soul Music Records, he has produced retrospective albums on Shirley Murdock and Howard Hewitt and is currently completing work on four 2024 releases by disco/soul icons Loleatta Holloway, Taana Gardner, First Choice and Double Exposure. He has also written liner notes for the aforementioned Shirley Murdock compilation, as well as anthology projects on The Sweet Inspirations (Cissy Houston), The Weather Girls, The Mighty Clouds of Joy, and the Staple Singers among others. He is currently completing a book, Express Yourself in Me: Black Power, Gay Liberation and Disco Heat with a Holy Ghost Touch, about the innovative New York Community Choir, famed for their gospel-disco crossover success in the seventies. A graduate of the State University of New York at Albany, Dillinger-Curenton double majored in Africana Studies and Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies. 

Project Advisors

Ashon Crawley is a writer, artist and teacher, exploring the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness and spirituality. Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia, he is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press). He is currently working on a book about black social life; a book about the Hammond B3 organ, the black church, and sexuality; and a short story collection. A MacDowell interdisciplinary arts fellow, and a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, his work has been featured at Second Street Gallery, Welcome Gallery, Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum. All his work is about otherwise possibility.

Kathryn Lofton is Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, Professor of History and Divinity, at Yale University. A scholar of religion in American history, her work focuses on how religion organizes capitalism, secularism, institutional and mass culture. Her work connects religious studies with LGBT studies, performance studies, and Black studies to explore the conjunction of race, gender, and sexuality in religion. She is the author of two books, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (2011) and Consuming Religion (2017), and one co-edited (with Laurie Maffly-Kipp) collection, Women's Work. An Anthology of African-American Women's Historical Writings(2010). Recent essays have described religion in documentary film, secular aesthetics in musical theater, and the transphobia of freethought.

Kent L. Brintnall is an Associate Professor affiliated with the Religious Studies Department and the Women's & Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure and the co-editor of several collections: Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion; Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies; and Lee Edelman and the Queer Study of Religion. He is currently working on book on queer negativity engaging Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Georges Bataille, and the Afro-pessimists. He was, from 1994-2002, an active member of the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco and is enormously grateful for so many moments in that rich experience.

Lynn Jordan has been an active member of MCC San Francisco since the church’s denominational chartering in 1970. He was a deacon in MCC San Francisco during the 1980’s and 1990’s doing lay chaplaincy, home, hospice and hospital visitations of congregants with HIV/AIDS. As the church historian, Lynn cataloged and maintained the extensive archives documenting the "AIDS Years“ in MCC San Francisco, which have been made available for research projects and exhibits. That collection has recently been donated to the San Francisco Public Library as part of the MCC San Francisco archive. 

Mark D. Jordan is Niebuhr Research Professor at Harvard’s Divinity School and a visiting professor at Emory University. He has regularly offered courses on Western traditions of soul-shaping, the connections of religion to literature, and the prospects for sexual ethics. His current courses reflect on the projects of queer theology and imagine new forms for ethical writing. Jordan has published a number of books on these topics. The latest, Queer Callings, recalls alternate languages from the last century that sought to describe the loves of bodily spirits.

Also Hear Us On